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Comment Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score 1) 173

I'm not a doomsday prepper but, from what I hear, a lot of the ultra wealthy ARE prepping. It makes no sense not to do some prep when one has that much wealth. It's just another bet to hedge.

Most of those people can't do shit. They will need people around them. If society really collapses then they're just more mouths to feed and those other people will kick them out of the doors of their bunkers if they're lucky. Too bad most of those people aren't smart enough to figure this out.

If WWIII takes out much of the internet and data centers, it doesn't matter what the cost was to get this up there - whomever controls it would have a huge upper hand.

It might well wind up being nobody. There will be signal-hunting drones.

Comment Re:How to make energy great again (Score 1) 145

Image models take a lot more memory, as one would expect. If you want to run a text-only generative model for coding or knowledge, or as a database for all your books or manuals or whatever, that works great. Fits in 8GB of memory, has more than enough context for simple projects. The more memory and CPU you have, the better it gets.

You've just got the most expensive use case that takes a lot more hardware. It's still not actually out of reach per se (or it wasn't, before the price increases) but the outlay to start is much bigger.

Comment Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score 2) 145

You're right, it's NOT free, it's SOMETHING YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

The really insane thing is that the USA spends more money per capita than ANYONE and still gets worth healthcare coverage and worse overall results, with lower life expectancy. There's even this effect where rich people don't get as good care as average people in other countries for a number of common conditions or procedures, because the whole system is so bad you can't even PAY for great service.

But that aside:

Solar is so gobsmackingly cheap, it'll pay for itself in almost zero time. The real cost is the grid, but generating enough power is so stupidly trivial it hurts. You put a solar panel out in a field and it collects electricity and that's the end of the story. You pay for that panel once every 20-30 years and it generates electricity for you. You don't dig things up out of the ground or fight wars, you just let it collect the electricity.

Technology Connections did an excellent video on renewable energy, and using just the figures for putting solar panels on corn farms that produce corn for ethanol and not food, his back of the envelope calculation was that you could produce 7700 TWh of electricity a year, which is considerably more than the 4100 TWh that the US grid currently produces.

The reality is there doesn't need to be any energy crisis at all. AI data centres don't even need to be an environmental problem, you can just hook solar panels and batteries up and run them and they'd even use less water than the corn fields that were displaced for the solar farm.

The whole discussion is ridiculous. More solar panels. Solar panels everywhere. It's effectively free. The only reason governments don't do it is so they can keep lining their pockets with oil and gas industry kickbacks.

Here's the video link to the right time stamp, if you want to check what I'm saying and review his math.

https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?s...

Comment Re:Attitude (Score 1, Offtopic) 24

In my exerience, the share of programmers that (a) understand that shell is a programming language and not some weird command prompt

It's a dessert topping and a floor wax. This was an unusual feature of UNIX, but since then it's become the norm, albeit with everyone else inheriting it from there. You can write MS-DOS scripts with complex independent logic, you just don't want to.

and (b) take the time and invest the effort required to learn it properly is surprisingly small.

I don't know that I've learned it "properly" to this day, but I can thank The UNIX Programming Environment for making me basically capable. (I believe that my paper copy is a later edition than this...)

Comment Re: U.S. Users? (Score 1) 29

I don't think this is trying to get back into the US market. OnePlus is banned because it's part of a Chinese corporation. OPPO is... that corporation. It's not going to confuse any regulator who found something to complain about with OnePlus. This is more likely a mundane tactic of being liked in Europe for phones and wanting to expand that reputation to the parts of the organization that sell other consumer electronics.

Comment Re:Bet against Elon if you like (Score 0) 173

The "you're stupid" above is indeed a mild ad hominem and could have been rephrased.

No, it literally is not an ad hominem in absolutely any sense whatsoever, period. If you think otherwise, you may or may not be stupid, but you're definitely ignorant. I could have phrased it some other way, if I were trying to be dishonest, but that is not what I do. I'm not here to be nice about shit ideas which ennoble or enrich shit people, nor to coddle their enablers.

Ad hominem means insult from a person. It is an argument that an argument is false because a certain person made it. It literally does not matter whether an insult is involved, although it can be. The fact that you're issued moderation points for a site like Slashdot when you're so eager to be so fundamentally wrong about what something means is utterly pathetic. This is exactly why moderation should be public, so people can know whether it means anything, or it was executed by someone who has no fucking idea what they're on about. This is also why moderation is and always has been fundamentally broken on Slashdot. Posting and moderating in the same discussion isn't allowed, but the people who are most qualified to moderate are also the people who are most qualified to comment.

I also note that you failed to understand the part about comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage, with your comical focus on insult when that is not even the core of what ad hominem even is. It's especially amusing that you quoted that section in light of your inability to understand either thing.

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.

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